Thanks to Board Game Reviews by Josh for the feature on Gamers for Cures!

I wanted to take a moment to extend a great big THANK YOU to Josh from Board Game Reviews by Josh. Josh is doing a monthly feature on Board Gaming Charities, and featured our charity and the 24 Hour Board Game Marathon for TSS in his October installment.

Please check out his site. He does some amazing work and I love his plethora of reviews!

Also we have gotten some of our raffles to the printer and should have them this week.

This year’s BIG 5$ raffles will be for these prizes:

1st prize: iPad3
2nd Prize: Mage Wars Board Game
3rd Prize: Defenders of the Realm Board Game + Hero Expansion 2
4th Prize: Magic: The Gathering–From the Vault
5th Prize: Dice Hate Me Games’ VivaJava: The Coffee Game with Geekspansion & Carnival with Sideshow Expansion
As a reminder please contact me if you would like to donate or be a part of this great event! Nov 10th is quickly approaching!
Or if you would like to donate via the First Giving site click HERE! (Or follow the link at the side of this page).
–Dan

2nd Annual 24 Hour Board Game Marathon for TSS date set and FirstGiving site is now LIVE

That’s right! The date is official for this year’s 24 Hour Board Game Marathon to Benefit Turner Syndrome Society of the US. This year’s date will be Sat Nov 10th 2012. Just like last year we will hold it at the best local game store in the area The Gamers Armory in Cary NC.

Last year thanks to all the great donations from the community and Game Publishers we raised over $7000. This year we hope to raise over $10,000. And we can only do that with YOUR help!

So please head on over to the FirstGiving site and help us in any way you can. And for more information on how you can be one of the Marathon Gamers for the full 24 hours please click on Mail tab at the top of this page. Or like us on Facebook and post your interest there and I will contact you.

As always if you are a game publisher and would like to donate games,promos or gift cards please mail us or contact us via facebook.

Thanks for your time and see you in Nov!

Dan

The event has come and gone and was a HUGE success!

Well after all the planning and after all the gaming, it’s over. I am real sad it’s over b/c I wanted the night to never end, but I am infinitely happy that it was such a success as well. So check out this all below for the whole story of the day. And please check us out periodically for both the next event (The Susan G Komen race for the cure in June) and the planning for next years Board Game Marathon!

So… story and recap below!

Ever since July I have been planning a charity event in honor of my daughter who has been diagnosed with Turner Syndrome for just under 2 years. I had always heard of these video gaming marathons people did for charity and decided that I would do the same, cept I would take my beloved hobby of board gaming and have my own marathon.

Thus I created a charity called Gamers for Cures and then the 24 Hour Board Game Marathon to benefit the Turner Syndrome Society of the US was born. I had approached my favorite friendly local game score, The Gamers Armory, and simple as pie we had a place to hold the event. The board gaming community as a whole was AWESOME with their support. Game publishers rallied around my requests and before long I had a bunch of games donated by publishers for use in raffles and giveaways for the event. I then got 14 people to volunteer to raise money and partake in the whole 24 hours of the event. I couldn’t believe how well it all was coming together. Add in some great publicity from great podcasts including The Dice Tower, Pulp Gamer’s Out of Character, What would Patton do, The Geek All-Stars and The State of Games and we were already starting to raise money on First Giving months before the event even took place.

Fast forward a bit to last weekend Nov 12th, the big day. After all the hard work Mrs. GeekJock, myself and Crystal and Scott from the Gamers Armory put in, it was finally here. We ended up with 50 items we had up for 1$ box raffles (you buy the tickets for 1$ each, as many as you want, and then put them in boxes corresponding to the specific item you want). Some great items were in this raffle including Eminent Domain, 1st edition ASL, A Few Acres of Snow, Discworld:Ankh-morpork -Collectors Edition, Alien Frontiers, Yomi -Complete 1st edition. We also had a 5$ big raffle we sold tickets for which included prizes such as an iPad2, MTG:From the Vault, Dominant Species,

We had a TON of great games in our dollar box raffles.

Defenders of the Realm + Dragon Expansion. People also donated on the day of the event getting complementary T-Shirts and door prizes. We ended up raising an amazing amount of money surpassing our initial goal by a ton… but I will get to that amount in a little while. First a little re-cap of the event.

The day started off bright and early. I woke up early picked up the Redheaded Pharmacist and we picked up breakfast. Chik Fil-A of Apex donated breakfast for our marathon players and it was nothing less then amazing. They gave us a bunch of breakfast sandwiches, some coffee, some sweat tea and a fruit tray. A great way to start our 24 hours of board gaming goodness off. The gaming started shortly after gobbling down some chicken biscuits, as I taught a couple of the gamers Alien Frontiers and saw a nice 4 player game going, and on the other table they had Thunderstone going on. Right after that we got a nice 6 player game of 7 Wonders going which was great. I simply love the game, especially being it scales well no matter how many people you have playing and that it doesn’t increase the time to play at all. Once the doors opened for the store to the public at 10am I had some friends stop by and I broke out King of Tokyo. K-o-Tokyo is always a good hit among seasoned gamers and rookies alike and today was no exception. We had a decent crowd around it for close to 2 hours but alas it was almost tim for the Tri-athalon tournament  to start. I still had to pick up lunch, which was graciously provided to the marathon players by Jersey Mike’s of Cary! So I grabbed the awesome subs wolfed one down and started to round up everyone who was going to play in the tournament.  The idea behind the tourney was to have 3 tables going of  4 people and rotate each round and get some winners of the games that were played. We had a table for Settlers of Catan, one for Small World Underground, and one with 2 shorter games– Dominion (with base+Cornucopia) and Quarriors!. I had to abandon getting my butt kicked at King of Tokyo by the 7 year olds and take my place among the tourney players. I had a great time playing in the tourney and managed to come in 2nd place overall! A bit of luck and a bit of skill but a LOT of fun.

Triathalon tourney winners

From noon until 10pm we had hourly door prizes for all those in attendance. Anyone who was in the store at the time of the door prizes received a ticket for the current drawing, and then they were able to take an item from the box of goodies. People really seemed to enjoy this a lot and I couldn’t believe how fast hours were melting away between each hourly drawing.

Next up,after some great pizza donated to the marathoners by Primo Pizza next door, was the Ascension tourney! Man oh man do I love me some Ascension. I got put at a rough table to start as all 4 of us were very good players. The good old Redheaded Rx beat up on the table and I had a rough game never getting much luck at all and round 1 was in the books and I was in last at the table. But, all was not lost as we had 2 more rounds to go. I finished tied for first in the next table with my other co-host of the Geek Allstars podcast Gyroplay (Todd) and then we were thrown together in the final table as well, which I also managed to get the best of him. This time though I had an amazing game just getting killer draw after killer draw and simply ran away with the table. Over on the other tables Mrs. Geekjock was doing well in her tables but she ran into the juggernaut that would be Red in her final table of the night who cleaned up again, en route to his berth in the final table. As for me and Todd, it seems our tieing for 1st on the 2nd table did us in, splitting those points and we were left out of the running for the finals, and that left Red as the only one of our 4 to make it to the final table. Red managed to finish in 2nd in the tourney, getting himself a copy of the Expansion (Reutrn of the Fallen), which he was real happy to get.

Once the Ascension tourney was over it was finally time for the ever anticipated raffles to occur! Crystal and Scott had been working on the game day $1 winners

Gyroplay unsure if we will save the world or not in Elder Sign

during the final table of the tourney and then we all gathered around for the big ticket raffles. Red was on quite a roll this day as he managed to win one of the 1$ raffle prizes and also won the big ticket copy of Dominant Species. I am real happy for him about the DS win, but that is prolly only b/c now our little gaming group has a copy we get to play on a regular basis hehe. The iPad went to the Giordano’s who not only simply bought their ticket the day before the marathon, they only bought ONE TICKET! I guess it’s one of those things, if it’s meant to be, it’s truly meant to be!

After the raffles things started to settle down some more as people began to head home and we pretty much only had the marathoners and the extra players who donated to get the all night pass to stay in the store after hours to play with us, left in the store. At this time a few of the guys were still playing Fortress America, my daughter Lauren was getting a lesson from Joey C in Magic: The Gathering (my wallet is not happy she learned this), and I jumped into a game of Elder Sign with Todd and Ruth. I like Elder Sign quite a bit and we went on an amazing roll (pun intended!) and came away with the win vs the Great Old One! NExt up while more people played some King of Tokyo, others played even more Ascension, and the Fortress group finally finished after 5 hours and moved to Acquire, the co-hosts and I set up in the back room for the LIVE taping of The Geek Allstars Podcast! We checked in from the event and had a killer chat with Crystal and Scott, interviewing them about our event and the history of the Gamers Armory as well. I really enjoyed talking to them and I think the show came out great.

BUT, it was time to get back to gaming! Todd, Red Adam O, and I got a game of Belfort going next and I think I can speak for all 4 of us when I say we had a blast. It’s a great game which is amazingly fun, never the same twice and you also have no idea how fast the time goes. Behind us they had a game of Revolution! going which sounded like it was quite hotly contested too. Once Belfort was complete there wasn’t a whole lot of time left for the Marathon. Somehow the day was nearly over and all we had time for was a quicky game of 7 Wonders to bring us home after a full day/night of gaming.

When it was all said and done we had raised OVER $7,000 for the Turner Syndrome Society!!! I simply cannot believe how much we raised, how much fun we had, and how receptive everyone was to the event. Not only that, the best sign of the day was that, at

GeekJock with daughter Lauren, and Crystal and Scott from the Gamers Armory

8am, no one was talking about how tired they were. EVERYONE was talking about how much fun they had and how they simply could not wait to get back to being in the event next year!

So there you have it. Sorry I have been a bit slack on the blog lately but it’s not without good cause. With any luck I will be able to get these 7 or so movie reviews I have to get  to done soon, and my usual rants about this and that should continue again soon. But until then please check out some of the great sponsors of the event, check out the site for more of the info about the event (www.gamersforcures.com) and of course check out our gracious hosts The Gamers Armory.

–Geekjock

Special Thanks to Triangle Direct Media

A huge special THANK YOU to Triangle Direct Media for their Generous Donation to our Charity Event!

Please do us a huge favor and check out their site by clicking Triangle Direct Media or by clicking the link on the side of this page.

If you have media marketing needs, social media marketing needs, Search engine optimization needs etc they are a perfect fit for you!

We are constantly accepting donations for the 24 Hour Board Game Marathon for Turner Syndrome Society of the US, so if you would like to follow Triangle Direct Media’s amazing lead click HERE to do so, or the link on the side of our page.

–Dan

More marathon day details for inquiring minds! And tanks to TreeFrog Games

As the days come closer the finishing touches are being put on the great day that will be the 24 hour Board Game Marathon for Turner Syndrome!

I would like to thank our latest donators from accross the pond Treefrog Games! They graciously sent us 2 great games for the game day raffles. First the great 2-player deck-building war game A Few Acres of Snow. Next another great game from the world famous Martin Wallace Discword: Ankh-Morpork. Words cannot describe how happy and honored I am that a great publisher has reached out to help us for the cause!

Next up is our announcement about one of the tournaments we will be running during the daytime portion of the event.

Straight from the Gamers Armory newsletter comes our official announcement of the Triathalon tournament!

Triathlon Charity Tournament

Like Playing Settlers of Catan, Small World – Underground, Dominion – Hinterlands & Quarriors?


Want to participate in a Triathlon Charity Tournament to help us raise money for the Turner Syndrome Society during our 24 Hour Board Game Marathon Event?

If so, please join us on Saturday, November 12, 2011 from 12:30 pm to 5:00 pm.

Seats for the Event are limited to 12 players. Registration for the Event will open at 11:00 am on Saturday, November 12th. The first 12 to register and pay the Event fee will participate in the Event.

The Entry Fee for the Tournament will be $10.00! All Event Fees will be donated by The Gamer’s Armory to the Turner Syndrome Society in support of Gamers for Cures!

 

1st Place – 4th Place will receive prizes.

Prizes = the copy of Settlers of Catan, Small World – Underground, Dominion – Hinterlands & Quarriors used during the Event. 1st Place will get first pick, then 2nd Place, then 3rd Place, etc…

There will be lots going on the entire day so please come early if you’d like to participate in some other Events and Demos. You may also want to purchase some $1.00 Raffle Tickets for the chance to win lots of very cool prizes donated by local Companies and our Distributors

Here is a sample list of some of the games which will be included in the $1.00 raffle and drawings!

Belfort

Ticket to Ride Alvin and Dexter Expansion

Train of Thought

Pacific Tycoon

Jab- Real Time Boxing

Battle Line

Catacombs

Survive: Escape from Atlantis 5-6player mini-expansion

Leaping Lemmings

Rusn N’ Crush

Manoeuvre

Cargo Noir

Blackeard: The golden Age of Piracy

Abandon Ship

Eminant Domain

Ivanhoe

Discworld- Ankh-Morpork Col ed

Formula Motor Racing

Homesteaders

Myth Pantheons

Code 777

The Isle of Dr. Necreaux

Arcana

Struggles of Empires

Pressure Matrix

Eleminis

A Few Acres of Snow

R3d November

Slapshot

Flash Duel

Yomi Complete 1st ed.

Rune Age

Puzzle Strike

Attack!

L5r: Emipre at War

Word Search

L5R: The Plague War

Alien Frontiers

L5R: The Dead of Winter

Carnival x2

 Any Q’s please let me know. Geekjockblog[at]yahoo[dot] com

And as always if you would like to make monetary donations please visit our site at Firstgiving HERE.

A special thanks to Dice Hate Me Games

I wanted to thank Dice Hate Me Games not only for a shout out on their latest podcast but also for their generous donation to the 24 Hour BG Marathon.

They have donated 2 future copies of their new game Carnival plus the first expansion (The Sideshow), along with 1 copy of Alien Frontiers.

If you have not seen the listing for Carnival, please check it out now HERE on Kickstarter. It  looks to be a great game and I myself have already backed this project. There are some great reward levels for backing so go and help them out and get your pre-order for the game today! You only have roughly 18 hours left to take advantage of their rewards!

Also we are REAL excited that Monkey from Dice Hate Me should be in attendance for some of the Board Game Marathon as well!

Please check out their site and if you have time their Kickstarter too!

Another Thank You to 2 more podcasts for the mention of our event!

A big THANKS a ton to two more great podcasts who mentioned our charity event on the air in the past week or so.

First thanks to Tom and Eric over at The Dice Tower for mentioning us during episode 224. You can find their episode here. It has always been one of my favorite podcasts on the web.

Also throwing us a mention was The What Would Patton Do podcast. A huge thanks to Steven and the guys over there for helping us get the word out. I am not much of a mini’s gamer anymore but I would love to have any of them come on down and participate in the event and try and convert me to the side of being a miniatures gamer! Check them out HERE and check out their show, it’s a great show to listen to even if you are not a mini’s gamer.

As always if you would like information on donating games or items to the event please e-mail me directly geekjockblog [at] yahoo [dot] com. Or if you would like to make a monetary donation to the charity please check out our firstgiving donation page.

Thanks again guys!

-GeekJock

 

A Big Thank You! To the Pulp Gamer Crew and Podcast.

I wanted to take a min to thank the guys over at PulpGamer.com for giving us a big shout out on the Out of Character Podcast. It has always been (and remains) one of my favorite podcast to listen to. They give great insights to the world of gaming from table top to some role playing and also talk about various things in the world of gaming including owning/managing their stores.

I know they are far away but you guys have an open invite to the 24 Hour Board Game Marathon from us here at Gamers for Cures! Of course as do any and all listeners and gamers come on down in the afternoon of Nov. 12th and help support us on our quest to play board games for 24 hours. And more importantly help support the charity we are playing for The Turner Syndrome Society of the US.

If you would like to donate a new game for the charity raffles/door prizes please contact me at Geekjockblog[at] yahoo[dot]com. Or if you would like to make a monetary donation to support the cause please help us meet our goal at our Gamers for Cures 24 Hour Board Game Marathon site at Firstgiving.

Keep checking out this site for more info about the big day, the publishers have been more then generous getting copies of games to us but we are always looking for more! If you have any questions on how you can help or just about the event PLEASE contact me!

-Dan